The Quick Report Genie

In Alpha Five Version 11 the Quick Report Genie has been rewritten from scratch. The new Quick Report Genie is considerably more useful (and attractive) than the old Genie.

One key difference to note is that Quick Reports can be used as they are and saved for future editing. In contrast, the old Quick Report Genie was a one-shot, one-way starter for the Report Editor.

How much can you do with Quick Reports alone? Quite a bit, actually: you can establish the overall structure and style of the report, adjust your fonts, and even customize the field and group labels. What you can't do with Quick Reports alone is to fine-tune your report, page, and continuation headers and footers, add graphics and charts, add controls and super-controls, add sub-reports and linked reports, or add bookmarks and Table of Contents.

When you've gone as far as you can with a Quick Report, you can save it as a free form report or a layout table report. This is a one-way process. If you want to keep the quick report as well as the free form report or layout table report, first save the quick report as another name.

Before the Quick Report Genie begins, create a new report from the Reports tab of the Control Panel, pick or create a SQL or DBF Data Source, and pick Use Quick Report for your method.

In the first tab of the Quick Report Genie, select the table columns you would like to display. At this point you can also adjust the column label and width and check off the summaries you'd like calculated.

You may automatically size columns to fit if you wish.

Select the fields you would like to use as group breaks. You can also set the group break labels here.

Pick your report settings. Note the checkbox to Use Layout Tables. This applies to the Quick Report only. If you open the Quick Report in an editor later, you will be able to choose between a Layout Table Report or a Free Form Report. Below the properties visible in this screen shot, there are settings for paper size and orientation.

Build filter and order expressions for your report. Remember that when you run your report you can apply additional filters; for SQL reports, there can also be additional terms added to the WHERE clause in the underlying SQL SELECT query.

If this is a report using table layouts, pick your style.

Set your choice of actions for page mismatches/overflows and preview your report.

From the report preview, you can print if you wish,and also save or email the result in a number of formats: PDF, Rich Text, Plain Text, Excel, and for Layout Table Reports, Dynamic HTML.

Non Advanced Search or Natural Search

The documents are returned sorted on relevance depending on order, proximity, frequency of terms.

Advanced Search or Boolean Search

Default search behavior

By default, all search terms are optional. It behaves like an OR logic. Objects that contain the more terms are rated higher in the results and will appear first in their type. For example, wiki forum will find:

objects that include both terms

objects that include the term wiki

objects that include the term forum

Requiring terms

Add a plus sign ( + ) before a term to indicate that the term must appear in results. Example: +wiki forum will find objects containing at least wiki. Objects with both terms and many occurences of the terms will appear first.

Excluding terms

Add a minus sign ( - ) before a term to indicate that the term must not appear in the results. To reduce a term's value without completely excluding it, use a tilde. Example: -wiki forum will find objects that do not contain wiki but contain forum

Grouping terms

Use parenthesis ( ) to group terms into subexpressions. Example: +wiki +(forum blog) will find objects that contain wiki and forum or that contain wiki and blog in any order.

Finding phrases

Use double quotes ( " " ) around a phrase to find terms in the exact order, exactly as typed. Example: "Alex Bell" will not find Bell Alex or Alex G. Bell.

Using wildcards

Add an asterisk ( * ) after a term to find objects that include the root word. For example, run* will find:

objects that include the term run

objects that include the term runner

objects that include the term running

Reducing a term's value

Add a tilde ( ~ ) before a term to reduce its value indicate to the ranking of the results. Objects that contain the term will appear lower than other objects (unlike the minus sign which will completely exclude a term). Example: +wiki ~forum will rate an object with only wiki higher that an object with wiki and forum.

Changing relevance value

Add a less than ( < ) or greater than ( > ) sign before a term to change the term's contribution to the overall relevance value assigned to a object. Example: +wiki +(>forum < blog) will find objects that contain wiki and forum or wiki and blog in any order. wiki forum will be rated higher.